Return of the minimal pairs

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 11:28 AM

> Larry Trask (31 May 2001) wrote:

>> I might also point out that, in the US, the word 'vehicle' is a traditional
>> shibboleth for spotting country bumpkins: if you pronounce an /h/ in
>> 'vehicle', you're a bumpkin.  Even the folk singer Arlo Guthrie, hardly the
>> personification of cosmopolitan sophistication, used this word to great
>> effect on one of his records to identify a southern policeman as a bumpkin.

> It's noteworthy here that Varro reports <veha> as a rustic pronunciation of
> <via>: "rustici etiam quoque viam veham appellant, et vellam non villam"
> (R.R. I.2.14).

[Ed]

That's really interesting. Were those 'rustici' making the link with
'vehere/vehiculum'? (in which case it would be an archaism, true or false).

The e/i vacillation is very common, in many IE dialects, but also in the rest
of the world, e.g. among Quechua housemaids in Peru: they always speak about
'me premo' (mi primo, 'my cousin', a eufemism for their lover) when speaking
Spanish. They also interchange o/u, like in 'me pichu' (mi pecho), another
common thing anywhere.

Ed. Selleslagh